A WINNINGATTITUDE

PLEASE NOTE: I am not an attorney and do not purport to offer legal advice. Please
view what follows as an initial guide to seeking further instruction and
legal advice specific to those jurisdictions where you live, work and travel.

Software Beats Hardware

I have stated elsewhere that mental awareness and mental
preparedness are the two most important priorities to survive and to prevail against
threats to one's well being. These are much more important than either your or your
assailant's choice of equipment!

While an instructor may be able to provide some exercises, mental awareness is very much an
individual responsibility. Most instructors offer some variation of the Jeff Cooper's Color
Code as a guide:

Condition White: This is lack of awareness, such as not noticing that the person
outside the window of the establishment you are patronizing is pulling a ski mask over his
face in the middle of summer. Condition white is not a desirable condition!

Condition Yellow: This is relaxed awareness, such as you would demonstrate while
driving defensively. You should be aware of who and what is in your environment and of any
behavior that seems out of place, like two men entering a business together, then heading
to opposite sides of the establishment. You should be able to maintain this awareness
without raising your blood pressure or your heart rate.

Condition Orange: This is awareness of a potential threat, like someone who appears
to be on a collision course with you on a sidewalk and who matches your attempts to step to
the side; it may be a mugger or it may be someone trying to ask you for directions. Your
antennae should definitely be up and you should be planning your options, including location
of cover.

Condition Red: This is identification of a specific threat, such as when the guy on
the sidewalk starts to reach under his jacket and demands all your money. At this point,
your mind must go on the offensive or you may lose control of functions of your own mind and
body, as well as of the situation.

I have presented it above as I was originally taught it, as a color code of
awareness. Only fairly late in my career did I learn that Cooper actually presented
it as a color code of preparedness. In the original version, the progression is from
being unprepared to employ deadly force to being prepared to unleash it if an assailant
proceeds with his attack. In Cooper's own words:

In White you are unprepared and unready to take lethal action. If you are attacked in
White you will probably die unless your adversary is totally inept.

In Yellow you bring yourself to the understanding that your life may be in danger and
that you may have to do something about it.

In Orange you have determined upon a specific adversary and are prepared to take action
which may result in his death, but you are not in a lethal mode.

In Red you are in a lethal mode and will shoot if circumstances warrant.

Going on the offensive mentally is essential to prevail against a violent attack but it can
put you on thin ice legally. This is because your state of mind can be viewed either as a
defense to a criminal charge or a necessary element to prove that you committed a crime.

Is your Assailant Human?

My late friend and mentor, Jim Andrews, who had to kill men while wearing the uniforms of
his country and those of a few law enforcement agencies, repeatedly told me that it had been
a totally different experience killing men in a military environment and in a civilian
environment. When pressed for an explanation, he responded that in the military the
soldier has his enemy systematically dehumanized for him in the training process, whereas in
civilian life, "a human being suddenly turns into a monster before your very eyes."

Killing members of one's own species is not "normal." Dave Grossman has written a
book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of
Learning to Kill In War and Society, on the subject of how we have learned to train our
soldiers to do it for military purposes and inadvertently trained many of our youth to do so
without the controls which the military imposes on its troops.

As Jim Andrews pointed out, dehumanizing your opponent in advance facilitates your use of
deadly force when you encounter him. I know of several instructors, each of whom refers to
violent criminals with his own pet, dehumanizing term. I presume that they do this to
facilitate their students' deadly force responses, when appropriate.

Such dehumanization will not sit well with the legal system. The law will regard your
assailant as human. If you are forced to kill him, the act will be investigated as a
homicide, the killing of another human being. Any suggestion that you viewed it as anything
less than that will only increase your chances of prosecution and conviction.

If the assailant that you are forced to kill is not of the same ethnic background as you
and opposing counsel can paint a picture of the assailant being killed because of his
ethnicity, it may be very hard to convince the jury that whatever word you may have used to
categorize your assailant was used solely in response to the assailant's threatening
behavior.

In addition, if you can be accused of having acted on the basis of racial bias, you may
incur additional liability under "hate crime enhancements," as well as a trip to Federal
court on civil rights charges.

Can Anger Conquer Fear?

As this is written, there is a significant debate in the law enforcement training community
about the degradation of certain skills associated with the traditional operation of a
firearm in the face of a life-threatening situation. Not only is there disagreement about
the extent of degradation of skill and physical ability when one experiences a "body alarm
reaction," there is also disagreement about whether this reaction is inevitable and
irreversible in a compressed time frame.

It is my belief that an offensive, rather than a defensive mental attitude, once a threat
has been identified, can curtail the alarm reaction. While there might still be some loss of
what are called "fine motor skills," I don't believe that it would be to the same extent as
if the quality of the reaction was fear.

In the simplest of terms, this might be expressed as, "don't get scared, get angry."
Unfortunately, this is a simplistic view of a complex problem and it can cause you a great
deal of legal trouble.

If the presence of anger becomes evident, even at the level of police investigation or
prosecutorial review, it may be sufficient to result in a criminal charge being filed and
argued before a jury. The law tends to regard anger as the antithesis of reason, so it
becomes difficult to argue that you made a reasonable decision to fire if you were angry.
"Heat of passion" is a phrase commonly used in the definition of voluntary
manslaughter.

If Not Anger, What?

The decision to use deadly force, upon recognition that someone is trying to kill or
seriously injure you, must be made in advance. Once the threat occurs you will not have
the time to make that moral decision; your mind needs to be free for the best possible
assessment of the threat and the choice of tactics.

I would suggest that you consider that if you are forced to defend yourself with deadly
force, it will be the assailant who makes the ultimate decision for you, for you cannot be
expected to forfeit your life or physical well being.

When someone threatens you or those you have a right to defend with deadly force he has,
knowingly or unknowingly, decided to gamble his own life. If you have the confidence in your
training and ability, you can view his bet as already lost. Depending on the time frame, he
may or may not have the chance to withdraw that losing bet.

This attitude does not mean that you are honor bound to kill or even to shoot anyone
who threatens you with deadly force. In fact, the intent to kill is usually an
element of the charge of murder. It simply means that if you can combine the
confidence in your ability to respond as required by the situation with good tactical
sense, you can keep control with those parts of your brain which set you apart from the
simpler animals.

Because "offensive" and "defensive" may be associated respectively with "assailant" and
"victim", you may do better to select other words, like "proactive" and "reactive," to
describe the mental attitude you must assume when you realize that your life is being
threatened.

You may, in fact, find that in becoming mentally proactive you are able to remain totally
rational and unaware of any emotion until the immediate problem is resolved.

By retaining the ability for rational analysis of the situation you should be able to
counter arguments that you acted from bias or anger, so long as you have not expressed any
bias or anger.

By controlling your emotional reaction you are much less likely to suffer
degradation of the skills necessary to prevail in the encounter.

In order for the law to accept your shooting of another human being, he must have placed you
in reasonable fear for your life or that of another innocent person. The emphasis is on
"reasonable." If the fear becomes an overwhelming emotion it can interfere with both your
reasoning and your function. I have tried to help you explore some possible answers to this
dilemma.

The Usual Disclaimer ...

While I'm not fond of the repeated need to consult attorneys, it is part of our current reality. It would be very useful
to discuss these issues with an attorney so that you can fine-tune the verbal aspects of your own attitude. Andrew Branca's
book, The Law of Self-Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the
Armed Citizen, may help you prepare for such a consultation.

Material is posted on this page for information and discussion only and
purports to be no more than the personal opinion of
Stephen P. Wenger.

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